Not a headline I like to see

Thanks, Washington Post. And first thing in the morning, too! What a thing for an old geezer to wake up to.

Great. My demographic. Although, while I am over 65, I’m not sick or poor, so I can take some solace in that…except that I don’t think being old, sick, or poor should mean you get neglected by society, and I don’t think any of us should be categorized as an acceptable loss.

More than 300 people are still dying each day on average from covid-19, most of them 65 or older, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While that’s much lower than the 2,000 daily toll at the peak of the delta wave, it is still roughly two to three times the rate at which people die of the flu — renewing debate about what is an “acceptable loss.”

And while older Americans have consistently been the worst hit during the crisis, as evident in the scores of early nursing home deaths, that trend has become more pronounced. Today, nearly 9 in 10 covid deaths are in people 65 or older — the highest rate ever, according to a Washington Post analysis of CDC data.

If this disease does get me, I’m going to raise a bony finger to point at all the heedless younger people who don’t believe in masking, or any other basic preventative measures. And I’m especially planning to claw my way out of the grave to knock on the doors of all those people who think that saying “it’s just a flu” is an excuse for ongoing contempt for core concepts in epidemiology. Or anyone who claims the pandemic is over.

ElonGOAT: Oh the cringe…the cringe.

The cringiest. Some group of Musk cultists created a cryptocurrency called ElonGOAT, and decided to promote it in the goofiest way they could think of: by building a monument to Elon Musk.

Elon GOAT Token has really stepped outside the box and did something no other Crypto project has dared to do. We built Elon Musk a $600,000 monument on the back of a semi trailer in honor of his many accomplishments and commitment to Cryptocurrency! Since completion, $EGT has toured several states in the US and has now decided to deliver this gift to Elon at Tesla’s Giga factory in Austin!

We believe that Elon’s potential acceptance of this biblical sized gift could catapult $EGT into the limelight and accelerate its various initiatives.

$EGT’s future is bright with our ambitious plans to launch EGT PRO’s merchant processing solutions in early 2023. We also believe with proper execution the subsequent run at multiple centralized exchange listings will take us to the top!

Right. So they’ve invented some fake money, and they think the way to get people to invest in it is to spend $600,000 on an ugly-ass statue to get Elon Musk’s blessing. They’re also selling 5,000 NFTs…oops, I just stole one.

They also invented an ‘event’, driving this statue to the Tesla factory to convince Musk to tweet about them, which would somehow vastly increase the value of their precious imaginary coin. They’re urging everyone to buy buy buy now, before the anticipated Elon Tweet sends the price skyrocketing to the moon. That’s it. That’s the entire foundation for its value, getting a nod of acknowledgement from the petty god they worship. They’re chattering away about it online. They’re begging Elon Musk to come out and appreciate their work on Twitter.

$EGT TESLA SECURITY PERSONALLY CALLED ASHLEY AND GAVE HIM INSTRUCTIONS ON WHERE TO PARK!!!! ❤️❤️❤️🐂🐂🐂🐂🐂

That was from 15 hours ago, and was the last comment from the people dragging this statue to Austin. Maybe we can take a peek at how well their scheme is working.

Oops. The line go down. They lost 60% of their value the day they delivered their monstrosity.

Part of the problem might be that, goddamn, this is the ugliest statue I’ve ever seen. Maybe they’ve finally found a way to embarrass Elon Musk.

I mean, look at that thing! It’s Elon Musk’s head grafted onto the body of a goat, riding a rocket. It’s hideous. What drugs were they taking when they came up with that thing? I need to know so I never ever take them myself.

It’s a pile of aluminum scrap. Musk is going to pretend it doesn’t exist because taking ownership would mean he’d have to get it melted down, another expense added to his long list of woes. Although, I do have to admit that an ugly wasteful lump of metal built to celebrate stupidity and delusions might be the most appropriate monument for Elon Musk.

How to celebrate Black Friday

We have a little tradition here at Chez Myers for Black Friday: we stay home, refuse to do any shopping, and god forbid we would be caught dead in a shopping mall. We have never seen the point of going into a frenzy of spending money just because it’s a day off, and because corporations have spent the past week dunning us with ads for “sales” that are really just them flogging the same old merchandise with greater intensity.

However, we’ve lacked a patron saint for this day. We haven’t had anything like a Santa Claus to represent the true spirit of Black Friday. We needed an icon of failed, lying, greedy capitalism run amuck, and what do you know, one has dropped into our lap.

Samuel Bankman-Fried.

Bankman-Fried had become a legend by pushing an image of monkish aloofness, vowing to forsake the allures of his extraordinary wealth — sleeping on beanbag chairs, driving a Toyota Corolla — and to give away his fortune for the greater good.

Yet in April, when Avedisian was hired as a master of ceremonies for a conference in the Bahamas sponsored by FTX, Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, she saw how the 30-year-old billionaire really lived: in a guarded island compound, every need closely catered to, the world’s elite at his beck and call.

That’s our boy. What better avatar of the spirit of the corporate world than a frumpy, disheveled, arrogant man-child who presents himself as a benevolent wise master, pretending to live a life of denial of the material world, while simultaneously indulging in the grossest excesses of greed and extravagant luxury?

Best of all, this month his lifestyle has undergone a magnificent pratfall, seeing billions of dollars evaporate, and reversing his image from wunderkind to poster child for incompetence.

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information,” said Ray, who once oversaw the liquidation of Enron, one of America’s most infamous corporate frauds.

Poof, all gone. His Bahamian penthouse is on the chopping block, his island refuge is exposed as a shallow scam, his philosophical pretensions revealed to be a lie.

The odd behavior did not stop Bankman-Fried from building a brand as the volatile industry’s voice of reason. He’d been celebrated for pushing for crypto regulation on Capitol Hill, donating generously to pandemic-prevention efforts and Democratic politicians, and preaching a dogma known as “effective altruism” that used math and logic to determine where their donations could accomplish the most global good.

We can only hope his downfall cripples that “effective altruism” bullshit, too.

It’s also the case that SBF exposes the incompetence of investment bankers and venture capitalist. What brought him down was stupidity and greed and a lack of skill in running a big company — he was a cocky child handed a whole bunch of money by luck and persuasion, and he lost it all with the usual tawdry criminal failings. And he still has people fooled!

Pack said his firm declined to invest in Alameda after learning that Bankman-Fried had hidden $10 million in losses and planned to use their money to fund FTX, not Alameda, without telling them. The episode, he said, had many of the same issues that ultimately led to FTX’s bankruptcy: Bankman-Fried’s secrecy and deception about how money was spent; his cryptic messages and shoddy record-keeping; his excuses for losing clients’ funds.

“They were very brilliant traders. They made a lot of money … but they also lost it almost as fast as it came in,” he said. They had a “cold, emotionless, calculated approach to playing with other people’s money.”

Not brilliant at all. Give me $10 billion dollars and an indifference to the suffering of others, and I could throw it all away just as quickly by buying over-priced real estate and being stupid.

Sam Bankman-Fried is the perfect symbol of Black Friday: a dumpy, dead-eyed schlub wandering about in a vast, sterile penthouse, staring at a cell phone, going nowhere. The anti-Black Friday is sitting down in a home with your grandchild drawing and playing games and not spending a penny for the happiness of your existence. Maybe we’ll go outside later so she can ride her scooter around the block.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are also runners-up for this distinguished symbolism. We have an embarrassment of idiots!

Well, that explains a lot about that shooter

Meet the Club Q murderer’s father. You’ll immediately regret it.

He goes on to say, “I praised him for violent behavior really early. I told him it works… You’ll get immediate results.” He’s definitely among the Republican base, emphasis on “base.”

Here are the immediate results his son got.

Longtermists are an existential risk

We all have lots to worry about already, with pandemics and climate change and political crises and growing irrationality, but one I’m increasingly alarmed by is the popularity of these pseudo-intellectual frauds parading about as “longtermists” or “effective altruists” who believe we should be worshipping potential future generations rather than dealing with real people in the here and now. It leads to distorted priorities. It doesn’t help that their thought-leaders are cocky ignoramuses. Émile P. Torres writes about William MacAskill’s opinion of the importance of climate change.

One finds the same insouciant attitude about climate change in MacAskill’s recent book. For example, he notes that there is a lot of uncertainty about the impacts of extreme warming of 7 to 10 degrees Celsius but says “it’s hard to see how even this could lead directly to civilisational collapse.” MacAskill argues that although “climatic instability is generally bad for agriculture,” his “best guess” is that “even with fifteen degrees of warming, the heat would not pass lethal limits for crops in most regions,” and global agriculture would survive.

I am not a climate scientist, but I know a number of them, and follow the work, and that statement is jaw-droppingly idiotic. Even with the amount of warming we’ve got now, we’ve had heat waves that kill large numbers of people, and this past year has seen a series of extreme weather disasters.

Record-breaking heat waves baked India and Pakistan, then monsoon flooding left about a third of Pakistan under water, affecting an estimated 33 million people. Temperatures exceeded 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Celsius) for prolonged periods in many places, and even broke 122 F (50 C) in Jacobabad, Pakistan, in May.

The Asian heat helped to melt some glaciers in the Himalayas, elevating rivers. At the same time, three times the normal annual rain fell in Pakistan during the weekslong monsoon. More than 1,500 people died in the flooding, an estimated 1.8 million homes were damaged or destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of livestock were lost. Food for the coming seasons will be in short supply.

Extreme heat in Europe led to wildfires, especially in Spain and Portugal. The drought in Spain dried up a reservoir, revealing the long-submerged “Spanish Stonehenge,” an ancient circle of megalithic stones believed to date back to around 5000 B.C. Electricity generation in France plummeted, with low rivers reducing the ability to cool nuclear power towers, and German barges had difficulty finding enough water to navigate the Rhine River.

That’s just this year! And the trend is ever upwards! Keep in mind that when climate experts tell you they’re concerned about a 3 degree rise, they’re looking at the mean temperature…and the extremes will be far worse. It’s the extremes that kill people and devastate regions, not the mean.

Yet here’s MacAskill blithely claiming that a FIFTEEN FUCKING DEGREE rise would be acceptable. Agriculture would survive, he thinks, so we’d be OK. Never mind the floods & fires & storms & mass upheaval & total disruption & civilization collapse. William MacAskill thinks he’ll still get his corn flakes every morning.

But don’t listen to me. Torres contacted real climatologists about that claim.

For example, I shared the section about global agriculture with Timothy Lenton, who directs the Global Systems Institute and is Chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter. Lenton told me that MacAskill’s assertion about 15 degrees of warming is “complete nonsense—we already show that in a 3-degree-warmer world there are major challenges of moving niches for human habitability and agriculture.”

Similarly, Luke Kemp, a research associate at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk who recently co-authored an article with Lenton on catastrophic climate change and is an expert on civilizational collapse, told me that “a temperature rise of 10 degrees would be a mass extinction event in the long term. It would be geologically unprecedented in speed. It would mean billions of people facing sustained lethal heat conditions, the likely displacement of billions, the Antarctic becoming virtually ice-free, surges in disease, and a plethora of cascading impacts. Confidently asserting that this would not result in collapse because agriculture is still possible in some parts of the world is silly and simplistic.”

If we’re really worried about existential risk and the possible extinction of the human species, I say we need to tar and feather these longtermist fantasists and launch them on a rail to the moon. It looks like delusional crackpots are going to kill us all.

Fifteen degrees. My god, that’s insane.

Keep talking, Herschel Walker

The man running for the office of dumbest politician in America has put out another ad, this time slamming trans athletes…right after the Club Q shooting. It’s not just the bad timing, but also that he has teamed up with Riley Gaines, the indignant transphobe, which opens the door to sick burns.

Barely a day after a deadly LGBTQ bar shooting killed two transgender people and three other patrons, Georgia senatorial candidate Herschel Walker (R) released a campaign ad slamming trans athletes. Democrats are pointing to Republican anti-LGBTQ campaigns like Walker’s as the type of rhetoric that led to the murder of five people at Colorado Springs bar Club Q on Saturday night.

The video featured Riley Gaines, a self-described 12-time NCAA All-American swimmer. In March, Gaines tied for fifth place with trans swimmer Lia Thomas. Gaines has been complaining about it ever since.

Fifth place. She’s complaining about having to share a teeny-tiny footnote in a record book with a trans woman. That’s a photo of two cranky losers up there.